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In the seventh century the kingdom of Samarkand sent formal gifts of fancy yellow peaches, large as goose eggs and with a color like gold, to the Chinese court at Ch'ang-an. What kind of fruit these golden peaches really were cannot now be guessed, but they have the glamour of mystery, and they symbolize all the exotic things longed for, and unknown things hoped for, by the people of the T'ang empire. This book examines the exotics imported into China during the T'ang Dynasty (A.D. 618-907), and depicts their influence on Chinese life. Into the land during the three centuries of T'ang came the natives of almost every nation of Asia, all bringing exotic wares either as gifts or as goods to be sold. Ivory, rare woods, drugs, diamonds, magicians, dancing girls—the author covers all classes of unusual imports, their places of origin, their lore, their effort on costume, dwellings, diet, and on painting, sculpture, music, and poetry. This book is not a statistical record of commercial imports and medieval trade, but rather a "humanistic essay, however material its subject matter."

"A fascinating book that takes us deep into Edith Sitwell's world of artifice, disguise, high camp, and verbal ingenuity. In these essays, Sitwell emerges as a central figure in an alternative avant-garde in early twentieth-century Britain."--Faye Hammill, author of Sophistication: A Literary and Cultural History Establishing Edith Sitwell at the center of British modernism, this volume showcases her many achievements in poetry, autobiography, novel writing, criticism, art, and performance. Forgoing the gossip about her eccentric appearance and self-fashioned persona that has too often overshadowed serious writing about her work, the contributors explore how Sitwell combined persona and poetry to foster an outpouring of iconoclastic creativity. The Many Facades of Edith Sitwell argues that Sitwell was crucial to the development of a British avant-garde that operated alongside the conventionally accepted transatlantic modernism of Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot. With Sitwell as an influential literary player and social architect, the British interwar arts scene was not an ascetic escape from personality--as the modernism of Pound and Eliot has often been characterized--but an alternative space of flamboyant, extravagant, and ornate performance. Allan Pero is associate professor of English at the University of Western Ontario. Gyllian Phillips is associate professor of English studies at Nipissing University.

A sweeping cultural history that draws on music, literature, painting, and film, 'History of a Shiver' uncovers how art pioneered in the 19th century provided the foundation for modernist aesthetics.

First published in 1978 Façades details the lives of three of the twentieth century's most intriguing literary figures: Edith, Osbert and Sacheverell Sitwell. Aristocrats emanating from a privileged but loveless youth, they moulded the scene of the English avant-garde throughout the 1920s and in Cyril Connolly's words, 'had they not been there a whole area of life would have been missing.' Picking up protégés and starting feuds with equal alacrity they were never far from controversy and were often slighted for being better known for the façades which they put up around their work rather than their artistic out-put in itself. Whether these façades were set up to hide their art or their deeply conflicted personal lives is one of the most compelling problems brought up by Pearson. With as much attention paid to both the private and public aspects of their lives, this biography captures the manifest intrigue of one of England's strangest and most flamboyant families, and the whole host of fascinating characters from T.S Eliot to Gertrude Stein, with whom their paths intersect.